The beloved family musical, Annie is now playing on stage at the Ed Mirvish Theatre.

As a child, I had enjoyed the movie and would belt out classics like, Tomorrow and It’s a Hard Knock Life, much to the annoyance of my family. I was eager to see the musical and it was an absolute delight.

Annie is a precocious twelve-year old orphan, who lives with other mischievous little girls in and the evil Miss Hannigan in a derelict orphanage. When she is invited to spend two weeks at the mansion of billionaire, Oliver Warbucks, her whole life, and his completely changes.

Unless you’ve been living in a state of complete media isolation over the last few months, you must be aware of the huge exhibit currently on at the Art Gallery of Ontario - Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors. It is everything it is hyped up to be: both vast and intimate, immersive and spectacular. But you may not be aware of another show that is just as intriguing. Yoko Ono’s The Riverbed at the Gardiner Museum is smaller in scale but more interactive, less solitary and more introspective, micro where Kusama’s is macro. I visited both shows recently and found, despite some huge contrasts in the physical art itself, more similarities than differences. They are, after all, both shows that ask you to consider your place in the universe and in society. Kusama and Ono invite you to think about both the solitude and the kinship of being people. You will not come out of either experience quite the same.

Growing up is weird, isn’t it? When you’re a kid, going off to college seems so grown up and far away. Then suddenly you’re a real adult, looking back at your freshman year and cringing at your awkwardness and naiveté. Or you might look back at your shiny, happy childhood memories and see a darker truth behind them, and start to question everything. And if you’re a noted writer and illustrator like Alison Bechdel, you put it all in a graphic novel called Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy, that gets adapted into a five-time Tony Award winning musical that’s part coming-of-age story and part family drama, with a bit of levity and lot of great music mixed in.

The Second City’s 81st revue The Best is Yet to Come Undone will be my third go-round at Second City, and as always, I’m amazed at how adaptable and relevant the form can be. Sketch comedy really showcases the electric chemistry a group of performers can have with each other, sparking ideas and tossing razor-sharp dialogue back and forth like a juggler with knives. The humour comes from the keen observation of contemporary issues, the depth of the characters, and a perfect sense of timing.

A woman stands centre stage, wearing a gaudy circus ringmaster’s jacket and a giant banana on her head. Her gaze is direct and frank, even confrontational, as she asks us - a slightly nervous audience packed into a garage-like black box of a theatre - just how offensive we find her costume. It’s a banana, you see. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. The audience squirms a little but is silent. We’re good audience members. We know not to disturb the performers. But the woman in the ringmaster’s jacket doesn’t let up. “So you’re okay with banana? What about halfie? Hapu? Halfbreed?” Cautious hands start to go up and then go right back down again, held tight in laps. The woman with the banana on her head turns to her companion, a woman wearing a similar jacket and a headdress shaped like a fried egg and says, “Really tolerant audience tonight, isn’t it?”

Just like that, the tension breaks, and everyone laughs.Mixie and the Halfbreeds is a play that builds around doubling, contrasts, and opposites - tension and release, realism and symbolism, white and Other. For all that the confrontation I’ve described seems loaded, Mixie is actually a charming, playful, delightfully weird show about the experience of being mixed race. Written, directed by, and starring mixed-race women, the show was originally staged in 2009 and has been updated to be more reflective of the 2018 experience of being both white and Asian. Although the mixed experience clearly isn’t exclusive to that combination, the fu-GEN Theatre Company brings Asian-Canadian voices to the forefront as part of its mandate.

The Charming Modernist

The Charming Modernist is a lifestyle blog for curious minds that focuses on the best of food, travel, arts and culture.

Hello and welcome to The Charming Modernist, a lifestyle blog for curious minds. My name is Alison and I enjoy sharing my love for travel, food and arts and culture with family, friends and the online community. Read more >>